Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden

I don’t remember when I first discovered Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14.”Death and the Maiden” was Schubert’s testament to the process of dying. He had fallen ill, apparently, and he wrote #14. If you’ve never heard it, you can listen to it here.

It’s a remarkable piece of music, if only because the tumultuous Allegro flows through to the tripping, beautifully heroic final stanzas carry us down the path from “I’m alive,” to “I’m ready to die.”

I don’t know much about why this piece of music has been on my mind lately. Maybe it’s because Russ Minton recently saw it in concert. Maybe it’s that I recently saw mention of the Roman Polanski movie of the same name. Maybe it’s that I’m fat and getting older and trying to decide what I want the next forty years to look like.